This is a part of the Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Friday, 26 November and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, 9 December 2021.

Interview with David Duncan

  • Fedora Account: davdunc
  • IRC: davdunc (found infedora-cloud fedora-arm fedora-devel)
  • Fedora User Wiki Page

Questions

Why are you running for Fedora Council?

I have been in and around the Fedora community since the very beginning, but over the last 3 years, I have been much more active than I was in all of the previous decade (at least in my estimation). I want to participate in helping to make this a better experience for everyone, new users to seasoned veterans of Fedora development. I think that I can bring a perspective that is embracing and also preserving of our project as a whole. I am very much interested in helping to be a part of reaching consensus and seeking balance in our experience as a community.

What do you see as Fedora’s place in the universe?

I see Fedora as a guiding light in the RPM-based distribution space. Not as a place to dictate the future, but to experience what the future of Enterprise Linux can and might be. It’s also a place to define workflows and solutions so that there is an ease of achieving far-reaching goals for research and innovation.

How can we best measure Fedora’s success?

The best way to measure Fedora’s success is by the participation levels and the enthusiasm of the people who commit time and effort to using and building the Fedora Project as a community experience. There are many ebbs and flows in our focus as a community, but how we resolve those issues together and the commitment to resolve imbalance as a community is the best measure. That doesn’t mean that metrics for testing, build times, boot times, and other evaluations for industry compatibility aren’t just as important.

The Council’s primary role is to identify the short-, medium-, and long-term goals of the Fedora community and enable the project to achieve those goals. Right now, we are working on a new plan for the next 3-5 years. How will you help?

Operational Planning is in my bones. For the past 8 years I have been working as a strategic technical lead in the Linux programming and planning for Amazon Web Services platform partners. I intend to bring the strategies for building goals and the leadership skills I have gleaned over a long career in IT to the team along with a keen understanding of the business aspects of the ecosystem as seen from an OS Platform perspective. That includes collaboration with other members of council and community advisors to build a narrative and keeping that narrative fresh and faithful to our practices with historicity. I also want to bring a sense of respect and tolerance for all of my Fedora friends. It is our team effort that helps to make Fedora the first choice for those who are looking to engage with an open source community for their personal satisfaction and success. I want to help keep it open and engaging. Reply